[protege-discussion] Can I use my own database tables?

[Fred]

Jennifer Vendetti <vendetti <at> stanford.edu> writes:

> 
> Fred,
> 
> Fred wrote:
> > I'm new to Protege. We have quite a few Oracle database tables used by our 
proprietary Taxonomy appliation
> and other applications. We are thinking of migrating to Protege. Besides the 
Protege, our other
> applications will still need the access to these tables.  I have a few 
questions:
> >
> > 1.  Can we still use our own tables in Protege for our ontology contents?  
> Protege uses its own database format, described here: 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/design/jdbc_backend.html. 
> 
> If you don't want to use the Protege database back-end, you can write 
> "import" and "export" plug-ins that import & export your taxonomy to & 
> from Protege into your own tables.
> 

I know Protege use one single table to store all the information.  Does 
the last column "long_slot_or_facet_value" work this way:
If the content of the slot is >= 256, it will be store in this column; 
otherwise, it will be stored in the "slot_or_facet_value" column.

What is the maximun size for "long_slot_or_facet_value"?  If I have an 
attribute with the size bigger than 4,096 bytes, what should I do?


> > 2. If we can, how can we access the content of these tables? Do we use 
APIs, PlugIns, or somthing else?
> >   
> A common thing that people do is to use Protege as an editor and then 
> periodically export snapshots of their ontologies/taxonomies into their 
> own proprietary database tables.  The best way to do this is to write an 
> export plug-in, documented here:
> 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/pdk/plugins/export_plugin.html
> 
> There are examples of export plug-ins in our source code repository.  
> You might look at the HTML export plug-in:
> 
> http://smi-protege.stanford.edu/svn/standard-
extensions/trunk/src/edu/stanford/smi/protegex/export/html/
> 
> Of course, you will also need to do an initial import of your data into 
> Protege.  You can either write an import plug-in (a.k.a. "createproject" 
> plug-in), documented here:
> 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/pdk/plugins/createproject_plugin.html
> 
> Or, you could try using the DataGenie plug-in to import your data.  This 
> is a plug-in that allows you to import data from arbitrary databases 
> into Protege.  It may or may not produce a result that you would like to 
> move forward with:
> 
> http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DataGenie
> 


If I only need to randomly access a few records from my proprietary 
database tables, can I write some Java/JDBC code without using/making 
import/export plug-ins?  If I can, do I put my code in a slot plug-in or in a 
back-end plug-in?  Do I need to use Protege's Java APIs?


> Jennifer
> 
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